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XV No Light Without Shadow: the Control Of XV No Light Without Shadow: The Control of Language and Discourse in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Fiction Anna de Vaul Introduction Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author whose most recent dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last, was published in 2015, nearly thirty years after her first book, The Hand- maid’s Tale, in 1986. Although these two novels were written decades apart and the circumstances leading to the formation of the dystopian societies within the novels differ, there are a number of common threads running throughout the stories and worlds. These common threads include environmental concerns, ideas about the commodification of sex, portrayals of the dangers of allowing personal belief to in- fluence power, and a focus on the vulnerability of women. However, the most strik- ing and significant common threads, to me, are her focus on the relationship be- tween eutopia and dystopia and her emphasis on the control of discourse by each of the regimes. Eutopia vs. Dystopia As with many dystopian worlds, each of Atwood’s dystopian societies has its roots in an attempt to create a perfect society: a eutopia, meaning “a good place”, as opposed to a utopia, meaning “no place” or a nonexistent world which can be either eutopian no light without shadow 253 or dystopian (Claeys and Sargent 1999: 1)1. Atwood refers to dystopia as the “evil twin” of (e-)utopia and states that both can be used to “explore proposed changes in social organisation in graphic ways, by showing what they might be like for those living under them” (Atwood 2004: 515). In Atwood’s vision, this equates to suffering, at least for some; her protagonists exist in dystopian worlds, though the societies were ini- tially conceived of and presented as eutopian and do function as such for a portion of their residents. As Eugene Goodheart points out, the attempt to create a eutopia “[…] becomes problematic, even pernicious, when it enters the historical realm with ambitions to transform the political and social order according to an idea”, inevitably leading to dystopia, as is true in both of Atwood’s novels (Goodheart 1973: 103). As Goodheart’s comments indicate, eutopia and dystopia are intrinsically re- lated. What is intended to be eutopian may, in practice, turn out to be less than ideal for some or all of its members. This has been true throughout the history of utopian experiments and literature, including in Thomas More’s famous utopia: “[…] More offers not an ideal state but a type of an ideal state—an imagining of a society that is ideal by certain standards and criteria” (Houston 2007: 435). It is not surprising, then, that these criteria and the state they lead to “are shown to be unsatisfactory […] rather than offering a solution to the ills of the world, Utopia is deliberately enigmatic, and sceptical about the possibility of an ideal human existence in this life” (Houston 2007: 435). More’s De optimo reipublicæ sets the stage for the destabilization of the idea of true eutopia being possible; if the society is ideal for only some of its members, it is inherently flawed. It follows, then, that if societies continue to seek and enforce a particular imagining of the ideal, some of the members of those societies will suffer. When this enforcement is taken to extremes, as in Atwood’s novels, a dystopian ex- perience is born. In The Heart Goes Last and The Handmaid’s Tale2, Atwood asserts that the distinc- tion between eutopia and dystopia centres around discourse; in both novels lan- guage, speech, and literacy are tightly regulated in an effort to control how residents 1 Claeys and Sargent define eutopia as a society “the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which they lived”, while a dystopian society is intended to be viewed as “considerably worse” (Claeys and Sargent 1999: 1-2). 2 While the MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)—and The Blind Assassin (2000) also contain dystopian elements, Atwood argued that the society in Oryx and Crake was not a classic dystopia, in part because it does not show the reader “an overview of the structure of the society” but rather is limited to individual experience (Atwood, 2004: 517). The Blind Assassin is likewise difficult to categorize; though the pulp-in- 254 anna de vaul discuss and perceive their society and themselves in relation to it, which in turn af- fects how each of these is discussed and perceived by outsiders. By exerting control over the discourse both within and about their societies, the regimes of Gilead and Consilience are able to effectively maintain the myth of eutopia. In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, a religious group has masterminded the take- over of the USA and installed a faith-based government run by men and reinforced by a strict and gendered class system. The narrator, referred to as Offred, is the epon- ymous handmaid. For the purposes of formalised, pleasureless procreation, she is assigned to a Commander, Fred, who is a member of the government’s upper eche- lon. In a surveillance culture where free thought and the expression of opposing or unorthodox opinion usually results in death, the narrator must walk a careful line. Though the Republic of Gilead is a good place to be for the religious men who run it, it is not for her. The Commander attempts to explain and justify the genesis of the Republic of Gilead in a series of illicit conversations with the narrator. “I'm interested in your opinion. You're intelligent enough, you must have an opinion,” he says to her. “I try to empty my mind. I think about the sky, at night, when there's no moon. I have no opinion, I say” (Atwood 1986: locs. 2602-2605). The Commander’s reply touches on one of the central ideas in Atwood’s vision of dystopia: You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better. Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better? Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some (Atwood 1986: locs. 2606-2608). In The Heart Goes Last Atwood addresses this same idea, though much more di- rectly. Stan and Charmaine, reduced to living in their car while trying to avoid vio- lent gangs due to widespread economic collapse, are offered the chance to start a new life in Consilience, a walled community where jobs, houses, and peaceful neighbour- hoods are guaranteed. There, residents spend half their time as citizens of Consili- ence and half as inmates in Positron prison, around which the town is centred. Both Stan and Charmaine accept the argument that this structure assures the availability of jobs and economic viability of the town; it is not until after they have been in spired worlds of the novel-within-a-novel are undoubtedly dystopian, the framing narrative is not. Therefore, this chap- ter focuses on the novels that Atwood herself unambiguously identified as dystopian (The Handmaid’s Tale and The Heart Goes Last), though it is worth noting that the commonalities discussed in these two are apparent in the others as well. no light without shadow 255 Consilience for some time, they discover that the success of the community also de- pends upon other factors such as the harvest and sale of organs and the commodifi- cation of women who have undergone a lobotomising procedure. Once the dark truth that lies behind the Positron project is revealed to the public, bloggers and pun- dits have a field day discussing the events that went on behind the black-glass walls of Consilience: […] others said that the twin city idea had been a good one at first; who could sneeze at full employment and a home for everyone? There were a few rotten apples, but without them it would’ve worked. In response, some said that these utopian schemes always went bad and turned into dictatorships, because human nature was what it was (Atwood 2015: loc. 4965). In both cases, Atwood demonstrates that it is impossible to achieve true eutopia; the society will always, eventually, be dystopian for some, if not all, of its members. Eggs will be broken, apples will turn out to be rotten, and, human nature being what it is, those who have the least control over the society or authority within it will suffer most. In Atwood’s vision, the distinction then is not whether the society is eutopian or dystopian but rather how dystopian it is, and for whom it is dystopian. As critic Dominick Grace argues, “while the opposition between alternate societal models in utopian fiction often serves to provide a simple binary between eutopian and dysto- pian possibilities, Atwood instead offers degrees of dystopia” (Grace 1998: 481) both within her fictional societies and between the different dystopian worlds she creates. Thus Stan and Charmaine and the other resident of Consilience are able and willing to look the other way when they encounter early indicators of the rotten apples in the town; it is still better than the world outside, at least at first. Similarly, the narrator and other women in The Handmaid’s Tale may dislike their situations, but they mostly accept them because it is better than the alternatives. Complacency is shown to be a key factor in experiencing less extreme levels of dystopian suffering. Control of Discourse: Literacy, Vocabulary, and Memory In both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Heart Goes Last, the protagonists undeniably suffer despite living in societies that are, in name if not in reality, eutopian.
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